Spotting Useful Experts
A very nice post from Shawn over at Anecdote giving a list of heuristics for identifying an expert (and how useful they are likely to be):
- Listen for stories (they give contexts for the application of expertise)
- Are they ever wrong? (don’t trust anybody who claims to be right all the time)
- Can they see what’s missing? (experts make inferences from small amounts of information and immediately spot important gaps)
- Simple, clear language. (not all experts can do this, but the really useful ones can)
- Triangulate the expertise with your social networks. (real expertise is recognised by lots of people)
- An expert in one field doesn’t make them an expert in everything. (they know their limits)
I thought of one more, which is:
- Is their learning visible? (really useful experts show you their learning process, which also shows you how to acquire knowledge in that domain)
Read Shawn’s post for more background references, and a bit of a discussion on why some experts (the less useful ones from a KM point of view) don’t always honour these heuristics.
Thanks Shawn
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